The Once (and Future?) Kingdom

State of Intrigue, the title selected by Tayiru Banbera and David Conrad for recounting the Epic of Ségou, has perhaps never been more apt.  David Easterbrook at Northwestern forwarded an appeal for preservation of the manuscripts in Timbuktu to the ALC list yesterday.

Baba Mamadi Diané’s map of Guinea in N’ko script was posted earlier on this site; he also produced one for Mali:

Map of Mali, in N’ko script

For reference, an unofficial English translation of the declaration of independence of Azawad (ⴰⵣⴰⵓⴰⴷ), with a referring link to the original in French, can be found here.

Ready for RDA?

The announcement for RDA implementation came out last week.  We offer here some links to manifestations of various works to tune into, as you’re analyzing creation and production processes and the relations between entities therein.

A Few Maxims

Languages newly identified or rediscovered: Gbin, Zialo

One of the routine duties for catalogers of African materials is to review authority files on subject headings through participation in the SACO (Subject Authority COoperative) funnel, researching reference materials to decide whether there is warrant to revise an existing heading or establish a new one.

In the case of subject headings for languages, this ideally occurs in tandem with proposals to the classification schedule, such that a call number value assigned in the  053 for the authority heading for a language will likewise be proposed in ClassWeb.

Occasionally, it happens that the references themselves are being updated to reflect results from current field research.  This is the case recently with two Mande languages:  Gbin and Zialo, studied and re-analyzed by Denis Paperno and Kirill Babaev, respectively.  Gbin, now extinct, was documented by Maurice Delafosse but, until now, has been accounted for only as a cross-reference for the Beng language, and did not have an individual language code assigned to it in Ethnologue.  That will change soon.  Zialo was considered to have been a peripheral dialect of Loma, but Babaev’s work shows it to have lexical and morphological characteristics that are closer to Bandi and Mende.  It received a new code, zil, in ISO 639-3 after the most recent print version of the Ethnologue (16th, 2009) was published, and has had an authority record in LCSH since 2011.

E-books in African Languages

Current links to a handful of resources with links to books in African languages, some digitized and some born digital:

The Digital Somali Library at Indiana, and a hyperlinked Book of Genesis in Nuer.

The African Language Materials Archive, a collaborative project between DLIR and WARC.

SIL Bibliography (Country Index: Africa).

Check back for more; we’ll be eager to see this list grow!

 

 

Black History Month

In appreciation of February as Black History Month, here are a few links to online exhibits and upcoming events:

The University of Virginia hosts a database of emigrants and emancipators, tracing through the history of migration of US freedmen to Liberia.  The Virginia Historical Society has uploaded almost two thousand digitized historical documents relating to Virginians of African descent and the experience of slavery and emancipation, out of a total collection of an estimated eight million that remained unpublished.

Low Country Africana brings together research tools and resources covering black heritage in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Yale’s Public History Institute will host, with the co-sponsorship of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, an eight-day seminar in July, addressing issues of interpretation of African American history.

The Smithsonian also takes a look through an exhibit running through October 14th entitled “Paradox of Liberty”, about slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello.

And, on a much lighter note:  Bogolan!

Coptic Manuscripts and Papyri

A couple of the larger resources for searching materials in Coptic include APIS, housed at Columbia, for papyri, and CMCL, based in Rome, for manuscript material, including the works of Shenoute the Archimandrite.

They’re works in progress:  check if your institution’s collections have been fully uploaded.  US member institutions of APIS include UC-Berkeley, CSU-Sacramento, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Michigan, NYU, Penn, Princeton, SMU, Stanford, Union Theological Seminary, Washington State-Pullman, Wisconsin and Yale.  Members of CMCL include Columbia, Michigan, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and Yale.

There used to be a romanization table available for Coptic, included in the Greek table.  Since the updating of the Greek table, this is no longer the case, but a new table for Coptic is expected to be drafted later.  In the meantime, a guide can be found here.

MARC Organization Code

BREAKING NEWS: The Africana Subject Funnel has applied for and been assigned MARC Organization Code <CaStASA> which will facilitate the collection of funnel statistics. 

Recent book on standardization of Gabonese languages

Ecriture et Standardisation des Langues Gabonaises, sous la direction de Jacques Hubert & Paul Achille Mavoungou (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2010). From back cover: “The language situation of Gabon is given fair treatment and specific issues of alphabet and writing, orthography and standardisation, phonology and graphic representation are discussed and resolved. Standardisation of orthography is also argued for as a way to facilitate the development of dictionaries and the sharing of research data and analyses within the Gabonese language clusters’ domain. Importantly, this work contributes to the debate on the state of African languages in general, and on Gabonese languages specifically that hitherto have had little fortune in being reduced to a written code. The need for research to empower Gabonese languages through their development is argued.” (Andy Chebanne, Centre for the Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS), Cape Town.) Contributions are all in French.

Ethiopic Manuscript Imaging Project

Steve Delamarter shares the experience of the EMIP project, where the cataloging is done by Prof. Getachew Haile of HMML in Collegeville, Minnesota:  “Catalogues and Digitization for Previously Uncatalogued Ethiopian Manuscripts in England and North America“, XVIth Annual Conference of Ethiopian Studies/፲፮ኛው የኢትዮጵያ ጥናት ዓለም አቀፍ ጉባኤ , Trondheim, 2009 (pp. 1305-1316).